Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) was a torqued, spiraling "cut" into two derelict seventeenth-century Paris buildings adjacent to the construction site of the controversial Centre Pompidou. With this landmark work of "anarchtecture," Matta-Clark not only opened up these venerable residences to light and air, he also began a dialogue about the nature of urban development and the public role of art. Considered three and a half decades later, Conical Intersect reveals the multivalent nature of the artist’s practice and his prescient focus on sustainability and creative reuse of the built environment.

Conical Intersect and the two buildings were demolished as part of a large-scale urban renovation of the historic market district of Les Halles; today we can know the work only from drawings, photographs, and a short Super 8 film. In this illustrated study, Bruce Jenkins examines Matta-Clark's "non-u-ment," looking closely at the artist’s proposals, working process, various forms of documentation, and the dialogue begun by Matta-Clark's decision to transform two abandoned buildings "into an act of communication."

Publisher: Afterall

Artist(s): Gordon Matta-Clark

Contributor(s): Bruce Jenkins

Designer: A2/SW/HK

Printer: Die Keure, Belgium

Publication Date: 2011

Binding: Softcover

Dimensions: 6 x 8 1/2 in (15.2 x 21.6 cm)

Pages: 112

Reproductions: 32 color

Special Features:

Language:

ISBN: 9781846380730

Retail: $16 US & Canada

Status:Out of Print

Stock:
Out of stock

Gordon Matta-Clark

Born in New York in 1943,Gordon Matta-Clark is widely considered one of the most influential artists working in the 1970s. He was a key contributor to the activity and growth of the New York art world in SoHo from the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1978. His practice introduced new and radical modes of physically exploring and subverting urban architecture, and some of his most well-known projects involved laboriously cutting holes into floors of abandoned buildings or, as with Splitting (1974), slicing a suburban villa in two.